Trump said it best: the Iraq
War was one of the dumbest things America ever did in foreign policy,
the equivalent of "throwing rocks into a hornet's nest."

Grandiose
blunders of this kind are not made out by stupidity, though, but by
insanity. The American conservative movement was infected by a cult that
eroded the common sense of its victims and instilled a messianic,
fanatical commitment to nation-building and democracy promotion. What
are broadly (and sometimes inaccurately) referred to as the
"neo-conservatives" are a cult that succeeded in persuading the
unfortunate George W. Bush to spend trillions in treasure and tens of
thousands of casualties for the mirage of democracy in Iraq. Such was
their influence that an entire generation of Republican foreign policy
officials was vetted for cult loyalty.

Messianic? Yeah, whatever. Apparently he's been doing a whole series on this theme. And I'm seeing more commenters at right-wing sites spouting this kind of stuff.

I don't know what to say about all this. I disagree with all three of them, but I don't know that I'm right, and I don't have time to sort it out right now. Since I don't have time to figure it out, this just leaves me with the taste of being betrayed.

I like a lot of what Trump is doing, but I still don't like Trump. Paul has some very good ideas, but he always seems to end up in conspiracy theories. I'm sure Goldman is a smart, educated guy, but I know a lot of smart, educated guys who are blind when it comes to politics, so I'm not really impressed.

What I do know is, a lot of people apparently hate me, and it increasingly doesn't seem to have much to do with right or left, conservative or liberal.

Look, there's a debate to be had between the neocons and the liberal internationalists and the libertarians and the outsider party, largely unnamed and unmentioned, who just want America to pursue its interests without necessarily feeling obligated to crusade for democracy in every place, every time. If you're in the latter category, you're not alone in being unrepresented.

But if you think you have something to say along those lines, come talk to me.

I don't get this. My 'one down, one to go' comment was a reply to your motorcycles and guns comment. Since both of them are good, I think I didn't get your point.

I'd be happy for an honest debate on this, but in each case that is not what the speaker / writer seems to want. If someone wants to say that invading Iraq was a big mistake, we can discuss that. But it never is just that; it's always evil: Bush lied, Cheney pushed it for the money, those neocons are an insane cult.

I'm seeing this sort of stuff kind of regularly from Trump supporters in the comments of various right / conservative sites, and that troubles me because a lot of it sounds just like the left, and I thought I had left the left.

I'm seeing this sort of stuff kind of regularly from Trump supporters in the comments of various right / conservative sites, and that troubles me because a lot of it sounds just like the left, and I thought I had left the left.

Yeah, but it's hard to leave human nature behind, Tom :)

One of the things my liberal oldest friend and I have been talking about is how alienating the rhetoric on both sides can be. She's in the opposite camp from me - a liberal whose father and brother are Trump supporters. Part of why we're talking is that she's trying very hard to understand where they're coming from because she loves them both. But she can't talk to them - there's too much heat and anger.

It has been hard at times for us to talk with each other. Sometimes I say things that I can tell make her angry, and sometimes it's the other way 'round.

It has still been a good discussion, because if we're not too turned off by the emotions we end up with a better sense of how the other one thinks and feels.

Take heart, Tom. This is a time of high emotions, and as Hume observed, reason is usually the slave of the passions. FWIW, I'm grateful for writers like you (and the others here at the Hall) who are grappling with all of this change and trying to make sense out of it. The answer - I'm pretty sure - isn't to retreat into our shells or feel persecuted, because none of this IS personal (despite the way it feels at times).

I've been struggling with a lot of these thoughts myself, and am inclined to think it's time to show some leadership and help find a way through the miasma of anger and hysteria. To the extent your writing helps that along, I thank you.

There was always a subgroup of conservatives very opposed to most intervention in the ME - paleocons like Pat Buchanan, for example. I do find full-out Trumpsters to be like liberals have been in their oversensitivity to criticism (dude, you won, relax) but I also get it, because criticism hasn't died down either.

As for the wars they were wildly more expensive than advertised, for many reasons (one is that avoiding casualties is the right decision but expensive); the American people can take about 3 years of war and then turn on it, whether we are right or wrong, winning or losing*; we had mostly won it, then gave it away, with the blame for that misdirected because people wanted it over; the wars since 1990 have been perceived as bailing out Europe and Israel, which goes against an isolationism still found in America left and right; we found silver but not gold for WMD. (I still think the Russians helped move items of importance to Syria in December 2002. Sarindar.) Taken together, a rejection of those wars was perhaps inevitable, but may not be permanent.

*For example, we were in Vietnam but did not put a lot of troops there until 1965. Three years later we had significant and growing opposition to it. More from older people than from college students, BTW, in contrast to the myth.

I do find full-out Trumpsters to be like liberals have been in their oversensitivity to criticism (dude, you won, relax) but I also get it, because criticism hasn't died down either.

Exactly - far from it. They are dealing with a level of criticism that verges on the self-refuting. I say "verges" because I think some of the criticisms, though not the tone or the means by which they were expressed, have real merit.

I thought this was well written and reasoned:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thomas-hobbes-presidency-1486426412

[excerpt follows, since it's behind a paywall)

Had it been Barack Obama, rather than Donald Trump, who suggested a moral equivalency between the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Republican politicians would not now be rushing through their objections to the comparison in TV interviews while hoping to pivot to tax reform.

Had it been the president of three weeks ago who had answered Bill O’Reilly’s comment that Mr. Putin “is a killer” by saying, “We’ve got a lot of killers,” and “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?” conservative pundits wouldn’t rest with calling the remark “inexplicable” or “troubling.” They would call it moral treason and spend the next four years playing the same clip on repeat, right through the next election.

In 2009, Mr. Obama gave a series of speeches containing passing expressions of regret for vaguely specified blemishes from the American past. Examples: “The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in history.” And “we’ve made some mistakes.” This was the so-called Apology Tour, in which the word “apologize” was never uttered. Even so, conservatives still fume about it.

This time, Mr. Trump didn’t apologize for America. He indicted it. He did so in language unprecedented for any sitting or former president. He did it in a manner guaranteed, and perhaps calculated, to vindicate every hard-left slander of “Amerika.” If you are the sort who believes the CIA assassinated JFK, masterminded the crack-cocaine epidemic, and deliberately lied us into the war in Iraq—conspiracy theories on a moral par with the way the Putin regime behaves in actual fact—then this president is for you.

I have a problem with this kind of rhetoric. It's irresponsible, and sadly, defending requires a great many conservatives to turn their backs on their previously cherished and publicly expressed values.

Unlike most of the media, I'm inclined to give this guy some leeway. Communication is rarely a precise art. But these guys have got to develop some message discipline. In some cases, they're generating blowback without gaining much of anything valuable in return.

It's irresponsible, and sadly, defending requires a great many conservatives to turn their backs on their previously cherished and publicly expressed values.

I imagine Trump as being under the weight of guilt for having ordered killings for the first time in his life only days before the interview. Trump-haters would tell me, of course, that he has no conscience because he is a monster; but I imagine that is probably an overstatement.

My own principles on the subject are captured in the piece I wrote many years ago against maintaining the illusion of clean hands. While it's silly to say that the CIA assassinated JFK, it's only the truth to say that they tried their best to assassinate Castro. Speaking the truth, in order to grapple with the hard parts, is very much in line with what I take to be the right way to think about politics.

...the American people can take about 3 years of war and then turn on it, whether we are right or wrong, winning or losing*; we had mostly won it, then gave it away, with the blame for that misdirected because people wanted it over...

I take this to be one of the key problems in foreign policy. The lesson of Iraq, ultimately, is that America can't commit. That's a huge weakness.

Well, that's not an irrational stance (however much I may dislike it). Absent a convincing existential threat, people don't feel enough pain to justify the cost.

And it's always hard to argue, "Well, we need to suck it up now to avoid worse pain later". The natural tendency to optimism bias makes us reluctant to sacrifice short term comfort for long term gain. That's a nicer way of saying that generally most people have to be smacked upside the heads with a 2x4 to concentrate their minds :p

Whether it's rational or not, it seems to be true. Since it's true, it's something we have to plan around.

But it's a weakness, one that more than anything else undercuts the neoconservative ideology. I found their arguments pretty plausible in 2004, when we hadn't yet hit the wall. Since 2006, it's clear that they just aren't right. As a practical fact, America just can't be the nation they want it to be. That may be a sorrowful thing, but there it is.

Grandiose blunders of this kind are not made out by stupidity, though, but by insanity. The American conservative movement was infected by a cult that eroded the common sense of its victims and instilled a messianic, fanatical commitment to nation-building and democracy promotion.

As you know, I supported Bush and what we tried to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I did so with my eyes wide open, and with full awareness of the cost. The personal cost to me was slight (2 full years apart from my husband, and many more years when he worked absolutely unGodly hours). The cost to many others was heartbreaking.

And it was always a possibility that we would have to pay that price.

I am pretty sure that I am neither stupid, messianic, nor insane. People who talk this way are not reasonable, and it's hard for me to care what they think. This is the language of contempt, which sadly seems to be replacing English in political discourse of late.

I have heard very reasonable cases against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and many more poorly reasoned ones). The thing is, this outcome was far from unguessable. It is what I feared would happen.

That said, given the chance and knowing what I know now (that today's outcome was *possible*, but not certain - for that is all we can know of the future), I would not change my support. There was much that was noble and even great in this venture, and much that was horrifying and unbearably sad.

And all I have to say about this Spengler character is, "Oh for Pete's sake, grow up." :p

Spengler is given to what Obama liked to call 'the prophetic voice.' But I don't think he means you and me when he talks about the neocon "cult." He means the intellectuals who coined the term, and who are the most properly named by it.

After 9/11, I reoriented my entire life toward the war. With the exception of a year I spent training horses (~2006), from 9/11 until 2009 I was involved in the war as a full time affair. Even after that I was involved in other ways, sometimes full time and sometimes not.

I used to argue at BLACKFIVE that we couldn't lose in Iraq, unless we quit. The strategic forces at work were bright and clear in my mind, and we had all we needed to see it through. All we had to do was not quit.

We quit. Not you and me, but America turned its back hardcore on the war. They voted for a man they knew almost nothing about, just so he'd make it go away.

I don't much care if he meant folks like you or me or not. In fact, I assumed he didn't mean me. That's really immaterial in my mind.

To call a policy you disagree with "insanity" necessarily suggests that only crazy people or fools would support it. And I am neither. My husband, who was preparing to retire (and who decided to stay in, fearing - not hoping - we were headed for war) on 9/11 is neither.

Yes, America quit. And I agree with you that all we had to do was *not* quit - hang in there. I stand by my previously expressed opinion that speaking in such contemptuous terms - on no evidence but his own high opinion of himself, or perhaps the unimpressive feat of having been right in hindsight - does not make me think highly of either his ability to make an argument or his character. When ordinary men attempt to speak with a "prophetic voice", they generally succeed only in sounding pompous and full of themselves.

Well, I borrowed the term from him, so it's appropriate you come back to him. :) Although it may be I got it from this article, which talks about the Reverend Mr. Wright as speaking in "the prophetic mode."

This is an interesting lesson. I agree, but I don't think it's the American people, per se.

When virtually the entire academic establishment, the left wing media establishment, and community organizers across the land vociferously oppose the war through lies and propaganda, how long will it be before the people begin to believe something must be wrong? Every anonymous rumor of Bush administration malfeasance, every misstep, every error that cost someone's life, every low-level crime by a US soldier was magnified a thousand times in the drive to discredit Bush and end the war ASAP.

We saw a good bit of this with the Vietnam war as well, so that's not as good a data point as it seems for a 3-year limit. Someone once remarked that the anti-war protestors were really re-enactors; they were re-enacting the "glorious" anti-Vietnam protests of their parents, much like some people re-enact Civil War battles.

From their point of view, they were being heroic. From mine, their media leaders and intellectual leaders were close to treason. But, they are all part of America, and they ensure we won't commit to long wars, regardless of the cost.

we found silver but not gold for WMD. (I still think the Russians helped move items of importance to Syria in December 2002. Sarindar.)

I'm curious what would count as gold. We did find 5000+ WMDs, 2400 of them in one cache, rockets w/ nerve gas. The anti-war folks yammer on about how these were made pre-Desert Storm and so do not prove Bush right, but I think they're wrong. The UN resolutions were to eliminate Saddam's pre-1991 stockpiles, programs for developing and producing WMDs, and any new WMDs he may have acquired. The AUMF directs Bush to enforce the UN resolutions, which explicitly included pre-1991 WMDs.

Also, I think we have some evidence that WMDs were shipped to Syria just before the invasion. Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong (2nd in command of CENTCOM under Franks) makes that claim in his book, Inside Centcom. Here's a review of that book with his claim.

@ Tom - I first heard the claim from Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector (head of Romanian secret police) from a communist country. He had known of similar programs the KGB had bragged about and explained to him, and still received occasional backdoor information about.

As for silver, nukes were probably the only politically-usable gold, unless chemical and biological weapons were new, up, and at the ready. Nukes were promised and didn't show. That may not be a fair standard, but it was an entirely predictable one, and that should absolutely have been anticipated. I slightly know a retired high-level State Dept negotiator, very much a Democrat, who did not believe that Bush and his advisors were lying, but simply biased into only crediting the points they wanted to hear. He puts that in Clinton's lap as well. Self-deceit is something different than lying.

We were certainly looking for them, too. I went out to Osirak myself, where one of the oldest COPs had been established around the remnants of the nuclear facility there. It was suspected to be part of a secret nuclear weapons program.

Of course, what is usually forgotten is that the Iraq war did turn up a secret nuclear weapons program -- Libya's. They gave it up to avoid being the next Iraq. Later, Clinton overthrew them anyway.

Well, for whatever reason I can't get the sound on that. Quoted below the video is the quote: "there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

That doesn't sound like a promise that Iraq had nukes. That sounds like, "We don't know, but let's not take chances." There's a big difference.

I don't remember the "let's not take chances" spiel. I remember the administration saying Saddam was trying to get them, an Iraqi defector saying there was a program to develop nukes, and Wilson looking into whether Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake from Nigeria, but I don't remember anyone in the administration claiming Saddam actually had nukes. Did someone?